Ilsa

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  After a while Lorenzo left Brand sitting on the horse, and went over to the piano, stroking the smooth rosewood box with loving fingers. He looked at Ilsa on the bamboo chaise longue with Médor on her lap, then went over to Cousin Anna and stood shyly by her chair. She put an arm about him. She was making a tremendous effort to rouse herself from her customary apathy for Cousin William’s sake, but her face looked strained and exhausted, deeply shadowed about the eyes and white about the mouth.

  “Miss Anna—”

  “What is it, Lorenzo?”

  “You don’t have a piano, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have any musical instruments at all?”

  “There’s a harp in the small upstairs sitting room. I haven’t played it in a long time, though.”

  “Might I try it, sometime?”

  “Whenever you like.”

  His face lightened. He went back to Brand, who was still sitting on the marble horse.

  “That’s Othello and Iago over there,” Brand said, pointing.

  “Yes, I know.” Lorenzo ran his small bony hand down the horse’s slanting neck as it bent toward the water trough.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because once Mr. William took me in to New York to see Othello on the stage, and we read and studied the play for a long time beforehand. It was very exciting. Mr. William took me to see quite a few plays.”

  Brand folded her lips to a thin line. “I don’t like the theater,” she said. “I don’t like plays or actors.” She slid off the horse and went over to Monty, climbing onto his lap. He held her close to him, burrowing his nose in her thick ruddy hair.

  Ilsa watched them for a moment—at least her eyes were focused in their direction. I was no longer certain how much she could see. Then she got up and went over to Lorenzo, who was sitting forlornly by himself on the sofa.

  “Oh, please,” he said seriously as she sat down. “Would you mind standing up just for a second? You’re sitting on my tail.

  Ilsa rose instantly. “Oh, I’m very sorry.”

  “That’s quite all right,” he said. “People don’t expect to find tails lying around on sofas.”

  “Tell me about your tail.” She smiled at him. “I’ve always wanted to know someone who had a tail.”

  “It’s just an ordinary tail,” he said. “Rather long. When I have to go to school it drags on the ground, but when I’m happy it sticks way up and wags.”

  “Lorenzo,” Cousin William said.

  “Sir?”

  “I thought we had a talk about your tail a few days ago.”

  “Yes, sir, I remember. And I think it is a little shorter. But it’s still there.” He turned back to Ilsa. “Mr. William thinks I’m too old to have a tail now that I’m ten, because older people just don’t have tails, but I shall feel awfully lost without mine. It’s such an expressive part of me.”

  “Of course it is,” Ilsa said.

  “If you have a tail to express things with,” Lorenzo went on, “you don’t have to do it with your face, and that’s a great help.”

  “I’m sure it is.” Ilsa leaned back against the sofa, relaxing a moment. I saw Cousin Anna looking at her with worried eyes.

  “If I had a tail,” Ilsa said, “I’d never want to lose it, but I expect that’s one of the penalties one pays for the privilege of growing up.”

  “Is it a privilege to grow up?” Lorenzo asked.

  She nodded. “When I was little I thought it wouldn’t be because it seemed to me that grownups didn’t play and have fun and they had to pay taxes. But unless you’re very foolish—and of course a great many people are—there’s really much more for you to enjoy when you’re grown. Go on about your tail. How about when you’re mad?”

  “Oh, when you’re mad it’s lovely!” he said. “You’ve no idea! You turn around and stalk out of a room with your tail bristling and you look much madder backwards than you ever could forwards.”

  She laughed. “Oh, wonderful!”

  “And when Mr. William spanks me for something, as long as I have my tail to put between my legs I don’t have to cry.”

  “Lorenzo,” Cousin William said. “You have talked quite enough. See how quiet Brand is being.”

  “Well, I haven’t a tail, so mere isn’t anything to talk about,” Brand said.

  Monty put her down off his lap. “How about something to drink? Got some good stuff from a man I know.”

  Cousin Anna rose. I knew she didn’t trust Monty’s bootleg liquor any more than Ilsa did. “Thank you, no, Montgomery. William and Lorenzo are tired after their long trip.”

  I watched Ilsa while the good-byes were being said. She stood with her hand resting lightly on the back of the bamboo chaise longue, a strained look about her eyes. I noticed that Monty was watching her, too.

  When they were gone he said, “Ilsa.” His voice was rough.

  “What is it, Monty?”

  “How soon could you leave for Baltimore?”

  “Any time.”

  “Could you be ready to go by the early train tomorrow?”

  “I haven’t a ticket.”

  “Do you still have the money Henry lent you?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll go down to the station and see about your ticket while you pack then.”

  Brand had been sitting in the corner. We had completely forgotten about her. Now she said in a frightened little voice, “Why must Mamma go to Baltimore?”

  “Ladybird,” Ilsa said. “I—I didn’t see you. You should be in bed.”

  “You told Mattie Belle she could go home.”

  “I’m a neglectful parent. Come on upstairs with me now.”

  “Mamma, why must you go to Baltimore?”

  “Don’t sound so frightened, my bird. It’s nothing very terrible. I think I just need a pair of horrible horn-rimmed glasses like your arithmetic teacher, and the best place to get them is Baltimore.”

  “Will you be gone long?”

  “I don’t expect so. Just a couple of days.”

  Monty picked the child up with a sudden return of his old strength. “How about a piggy back?”

  “All right, Papa. Thank you.”

  “Would you like to stay here with me while your mother’s away, or go over to Aunt Silver’s and help her take care of the chickens and the babies, or over to your Cousin Anna’s and play with Lorenzo.”

  “With you, please.”

  “Will you do everything your father and Mattie Belle tell you to do?” Ilsa asked.

  “Yes, Mamma.”

  “All right, then. It’s settled. You’ll stay and take care of your father for me. Take her upstairs, will you please, Monty?”

  She stood by her chair, listening to Monty go upstairs with Brand on his shoulders. “Henny,” she said. “I don’t know what William looks like, or that funny little boy, Lorenzo Moore. I couldn’t see them—only shadows. I didn’t realize.… I haven’t tried to see anyone I didn’t know before. But I couldn’t see them—I couldn’t see them at all.”

  Médor was circling about her, sniffing at her and whimpering nervously. Ilsa pulled one of the dog’s ears, then sat down in the chair. Médor continued her worried circling. We heard Monty coming downstairs.

  45

  At the first ring of the telephone I was wide-awake. Daylight was coming in the windows but the sun was not yet up. I tore downstairs, not stopping to put on slippers or robe. “Hello,” I shouted into the phone.

  “Henry?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s Ilsa.”

  “Yes—are you back?”

  “Yes. I promised I’d phone.”

  “What—what did the doctor say?”

  “It was too late,” she said in that very careful voice. “If I’d gone to him months ago, when I first went to that fat old fool here in town, it might have been all right. But now there’s not a thing in the world to do.”

  “You mean—you—you—”

  �
��Oh, say it, Henry. Don’t be afraid. I’m going blind.”

  “Ilsa—” I could only stammer inarticulately.

  “I can’t see much now,” she said. “There won’t be long to wait.”

  “Oh, my God—but what—but why—”

  “Decay of the optic nerve. Atrophy, he called it.”

  “Oh, my God,” I groaned again.

  “Now listen, Henry.” Her voice was brittle, as though it might be snapped off as easily as the telephone connection. “Will you do something to help me?”

  “Of course—anything—”

  “I want to go down to the beach and stay until I learn—well, the fundamental things I’m going to have to learn. Eating and so forth.” Dimly through the wires I heard Médor yowling and Ilsa’s voice commanding, with a momentary return of resonance, “Médor, be quiet!” Then she went on. “I don’t want Brand to have to watch me while I’m still struggling clumsily to get—to get adjusted. She’s a sad enough little creature as it is. And it would do bad things to Monty. It would just make everything worse. I don’t think it’ll take me long. I’ve always been quick at learning things. Now, will you be an angel and drive me down to the beach this afternoon?” She was speaking in an even rapid voice, hypnotizing herself by it, hypnotizing me.…

  “Of course,” I said in the same flat way. I knew now that I had known all along that this would be the outcome, that the trip to Baltimore would be useless except as a confirmation of what we already knew. “But do you think that’s the right thing?” I asked. “Do you think you ought to go down there—I mean—how can you, all alone—” my voice began to break again.

  “Ira’ll be there. Another thing, Henry. Will you tell the others—Cousin Anna and Silver and all of them?”

  “Yes, of course. Have you told Monty and Brand?”

  “Yes.” She stopped. There was a long silence. I couldn’t say anything. I stood there agonizedly clutching the telephone receiver and listened to the bleak silence at the other end of the wire. Then I heard Médor’s voice raised again in an anguished howl and Ilsa quieting her, soothing her. At last she said, “One other thing, Henry. Would you just drop over to the house once in a while and see that everything’s all right? I think it will be—this has sobered Monty up—he’s being his very sweetest. And he adores the child so that I think if I’m away he’ll behave for her sake. At least he won’t let her see anything.… Well, I guess that’s all. Will you come by for me at about two?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Hen, darling, don’t sound so shaky,” she said. Her own voice was suddenly quite unsteady. “It’s going to be all right.”

  46

  I was over at my sister Silver’s one afternoon several weeks later. We had heard nothing from Ilsa since I had driven her down to the beach, raised the flag, and waited silently with her until Ira arrived. I spent my days vainly trying to gather enough courage to drive down and see her, knowing that I mustn’t. During this period I didn’t go once to the mill office. In any case my working there was pretty tacitly acknowledged by everyone to be a farce. Papa fumed and fretted but he didn’t do anything about it except make a big noise.

  If Papa had only made me work at the mill, or really sent me off to earn my own living as he so often threatened to do, I might have turned out to be more of a person. But I always had enough money, and enough time in which to be sorry for myself, to keep me from ever doing a useful day’s work. It is indicative of my intense selfishness at this period that I was far more sorry for myself than I was for Ilsa.

  It was lovely at Silver’s; after our early supper, after the little boys had been put to bed and were asleep, Silver and Eddie and I went out in the woods and picked armfuls of daisies to decorate the porch; not the prim white kind Milton was thinking of when he wrote: “Meadows trim with daisies pied” (I had recently looked up Milton’s Sonnet on His Blindness and gone on to read more and more of his work), but bright yellow ones with red-brown centers, long slender petals, and stems a yard long, the kind that go with pine scrub and wire grass instead of neat meadows. Fireflies came out on our way home and whippoorwills began calling all around us. The combination of those two, or even the whippoorwills alone, is the very essence of summer to me. Their calling goes on all night long, sometimes slow and soft from across the fields, sometimes so rushed and fast that they seem to feel that time is flying past and they must crowd in as much as possible as it flies. Eddie’s favorite hound, Bone, came along with us, having a wonderful time pointing lizards and grasshoppers, looking ridiculous padding around with his big feet after the blue-tailed lizards and the big red-and-yellow hoppers.

  When we got back to the house, our arms cradling huge masses of daisies, we saw the Woolf car. For a moment my heart leaped within me like a sea gull rising to the sun, but I knew that it could not be Ilsa.

  Monty was sitting in the living room with Brand and Lorenzo Moore. When we came in he sent them out to play. The sun was setting over the river; the water was like a red snake curling between the cypress and the oaks. The children went down to the dock and lay watching the water; we sat on the front steps in order to keep an eye on them.

  “You all right, Mont?” Eddie asked his brother.

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “Thought I’d come down to the office tomorrow and look things over,” Eddie said.

  “Might be a good idea.”

  “Think I may have to go down to Fernandina for a couple of weeks, and then over to Augusta.”

  “Uh huh,” Monty said, not listening. I got up and wandered down to the river and out onto the dock. The children had taken off their shoes and socks and were dabbling their toes in the dappled water.

  “… and my mother tells me stories or sings to me before I go to sleep and sometimes in the night when I’ve had a bad dream or something I get in bed with her and Papa, and my mother and I have jokes we laugh at together and she’s so strong she could pick me up and throw me over her head with one hand if she wanted to,” I heard Brand say.

  “I never knew my mother, and my father didn’t like me very much,” Lorenzo said. “I wish I had your mother for mine.”

  They looked around and saw me. “Hello, Uncle Henry,” Brand said.

  Lorenzo stood up and bowed politely. “Good evening, Mr. Porcher.”

  “Oh, you’d better call me Uncle Henry, too, don’t you think?”

  “May I?”

  “Of course. How do you like it here?”

  “Oh, I like it very much,” Lorenzo said, sitting down again and dipping his toes delicately into the water. “It’s different, but I like it.”

  “Uncle Henry”—Brand looked at me earnestly—“Papa said he thought Mamma would be back from the beach soon. Do you think she will?”

  “I don’t know, Brand,” I said. “Has your father heard anything from her?”

  “No. But he said he’d try to find a way to make her come home and then he said we’d take care of her. We’re awfully lonely without her. The house is a different color.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know.”

  “Do you think maybe you could get Mamma to come home? It would make Papa and me so happy.”

  “I’m afraid she’d resent it very much if I tried, Brand,” I said. “You know how she likes to make up her own mind for herself, and not have other people try to think for her.”

  “Yes, I know, but she likes you very much, and I thought maybe if you told her how lonely Papa and I were—I guess I was wrong, though. It wouldn’t do any good. She’ll come home when she’s ready.”

  “And she’s the only one who’ll know when she’s ready,” I said.

  Lorenzo nodded his little bird head wisely.

  The long last shadows were spreading themselves across the wrinkled skin of the river. In a moment dark would be upon us like a clap of thunder. “We’d better go back to Aunt Silver,” I said.

  The children scrambled to their feet and followed me up the path.

  Monty
was standing on the steps, his arm about Silver. Eddie sat on the rail, chewing a long piece of grass.

  “Run on out to the kitchen and ask Willie May for a cookie, children,” Silver said. When they had vanished inside the house she turned to me. “I’m going down to the beach tomorrow to try to get Ilsa to come back, Henry.”

  “Do you think that’s wise?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Monty thinks she might come if I persuaded her.”

  “Oh,” said. “Well, it’s on your own head.”

  “I know it is, Brother,” Silver said in her maddeningly cool and collected way. “I just thought you’d be interested.”

  47

  Early the next afternoon I went across the river to wait until Silver came back from the beach, though I didn’t have much hope that she’d bring Ilsa with her.

  Eddie was out in the grove, so I sat on the porch while the children played around and over me like puppy dogs. Violetta came by to return some sugar she had borrowed. I didn’t tell her where Silver was and I hoped she would go away when she saw that Silver had gone off in the car and that Eddie was busy in the grove. But she plunked herself down in the big black wicker rocking chair.

  “Henry,” she said. “I just can’t get over Ilsa. It’s just awful and I thought I’d die when Silver came over and told Dolph and me. She’s always been such an independent girl, and now I suppose she’ll have to resign herself to being waited on hand and foot for the rest of her life. Though who’s going to do it I’m sure I don’t know. I bet she regrets ever having gone down to that theater.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?” I asked.

  “If you ask me, this looks to be a judgment on her for the she carried on with that actor. I was surely humiliated the way Mrs. Jackson talked about it, and right to my face, too.”

  “Honestly, Violetta!” I cried. “If you believed all the malicious gossip that goes on in this town no woman would trust her own husband out of her sight.”